


The Sandlot: Revisited

by fearlessfan



Category: The Sandlot (1993)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:37:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13052292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearlessfan/pseuds/fearlessfan
Summary: Twenty years after the publication of Scott Smalls's ode to his childhood baseball team, Scotty and Benny sit down with a reporter to discuss how the story came to be.





	The Sandlot: Revisited

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dizmo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dizmo/gifts).



They both beat me to the restaurant, which embarrassed me at first - I was the journalist who’d arranged this interview, shouldn’t I at least be professional enough to arrive before my subjects? But before the embarrassment could really register, I realized I was glad; in the short period of time before I reached them, I was able to observe them together: two men in their sixties, talking with the ease of long friendship. They could have been my dad and his buddy Marty, best friends since the fourth grade.

 

But no one would commission an article about my dad and his buddy Marty. Scott Smalls and Benny “the Jet” Rodriguez are familiar faces to any Dodgers fan, and I could see several people at other tables looking over at them as I approached the table. 

 

Twenty years ago, Sports Illustrated published The Sandlot, a piece of writing that connected equally with fans and non-fans of baseball alike. It was the piece of writing that made me want to become a journalist; ten years later, when I graduated from college and reached out to Scott Smalls and asked if he would be willing to talk to me, he said yes. And now, ten years after that, when I called him to say I had this idea for a follow-up twenty years after its initial publication, he said yes again. To be more accurate, he said, “Not sure why young people like you would want to listen to two old guys ramble on, but sure, I’ll talk to Benny.” 

 

And so I found myself shaking hands and sitting down to talk with the two key figures at the center of one of the most popular pieces of sports journalism of the last thirty years: its author Scott Smalls, a regular in the L.A. Dodgers broadcasting booth since 1989, and Benny “the Jet” Rodriguez, who retired from major league baseball after more than twenty years, most of them with the L.A. Dodgers, in 1996. 

 

**It’s not uncommon for players on the field to have history that goes back farther than their current tenure with an organization, but you two are a little different. I don’t have to ask how you two met -**

 

**Rodriguez:** Yeah, Scotty took care of that.

 

**But I am interested to hear how your paths crossed again in professional baseball. Your piece touched on how many of you fell out of contact after childhood, which wasn’t uncommon in those days.**

 

**Smalls:** People nowadays don’t realize how completely people could disappear from your lives. When my stepdad got transferred and we left LA my junior year of high school, I honestly never thought I’d see Benny or any of the other guys I knew from the Sandlot again. 

 

**Rodriguez:** Now it’s more like, good luck getting rid of people! At least that’s what my kids say.

 

**So did you guys meet again when Scott was hired by the Dodgers?**

 

**Rodriguez:** No, we’d tracked each other down before that.

 

**Smalls:** You mean, you tracked me down.

 

**Rodriguez:** I wasn’t looking for you or anything! It just happened.

 

**Now I definitely need to hear this story.**

 

**Rodriguez:** Man, telling this story makes me feel ancient. But here we go. Back in the stone age known as the 1970s, we didn’t have the internet to tell us who won games. We had to wait for the papers the next day, or maybe get lucky enough to hear a score update during a game on the radio. And they always seemed to come when you were in another room -

 

**Smalls:** Another room! What a classy guy. He means -

 

**Rodriguez:** He knows what I mean. You’re in the can or whatever. So I find out from a buddy of mine in Double-A that they have these numbers you could call and get updates about the scores, and I call up one day, and it’s great. I get the scores, and the guy does a good job running down the game, and also, he sounds a little familiar. But I can’t place him. I figure he’s a low-rent broadcaster trying to make his way back into the game-

 

**Smalls:** Oh, give me a break!

 

**Rodriguez:** (Laughing) And then one day I call in and he talks about how the starting pitcher ended up in quite a pickle and I think to myself, “A pickle? Who says that?” And then I had my answer - Scotty Smalls.

 

**Smalls:** Plenty of people say pickle! 

 

**Rodriguez:** No one uses that word! Only you do, and way too much. I even told you to take it out of the article.

 

**Smalls:** And now we’re sitting here doing an oral history of that article, so who was right?   
  


**Rodriguez:** Pickle isn’t why we’re here, Smalls. If anything, we’re here in spite of it.

 

**Why don’t we table the pickle debate and get back to you reconnecting - so you called and realized he was your old friend?**

 

**Rodriguez:** Yeah, and so I called the number and got to the operator and talked to her, and found out that I was right, it was my old buddy Scott Smalls. He happened to be in the studio at the time -

 

**Smalls:** I practically lived at the studio. At the time, my apartment was so wretched that I did everything I could to be away from it.

 

**Rodriguez:** He’s not kidding. I think it was condemned a few years later. Or it should have been.

 

**Smalls:** Listen, you don’t earn big bucks doing telephone score updates. Anyway, Benny called, and I got on the phone with him, and it was like old times. We said we’d get together for a beer the next time he was in town - I had come back to L.A. after college, and his family still lived there - and this it the thing about Benny. He did it.

 

**Rodriguez:** What do you mean? Of course I did it!

 

**Smalls:** Most of the time when people say they’re going to get a beer the next time they’re in town, it’s just a polite thing to say. Especially when it’s to your nerdy high school buddy.

 

**Rodriguez:** You weren’t a nerd!

 

**Smalls:** Let the record reflect that I was the president of the robotics club in high school

 

**Rodriguez:** I forgot about that! Yeah, we all thought you were going to be a rocket scientist or something.

 

**Smalls:** That’s certainly what my parents thought. You can imagine how thrilled they were when they got that phone call sophomore year that I was changing my major.

 

**Rodriguez:** Time passes and now Scotty and I have been on the receiving end of those phone calls and you realize, at the end of the day, you want your kid to do what they love, you know? I bet your parents understood that.

 

**Smalls:** Eventually. I apologize, I feel like I took us a bit off track here, what were we talking about?

 

**That’s fine, don’t worry about it. We were talking about how you reconnected as adults. Did you stay in touch after that?**

 

**Rodriguez:** Yeah, though I was traveling a lot so I wasn’t around much. I’d call him up whenever I was in town, and we’d hang out, talk baseball.

 

**Smalls:** It’s hard to overstate how valuable that is. When you care about baseball the way we do - that is to say, obsessively, to the point that it could be a clinically diagnosed disorder - it’s hard to find people who want to talk about it as much as you do.

 

**Even in your lines of work?**

 

**Rodriguez:** I mean, yeah, sure, no one gets to the majors unless they love the game. But it’s also hard to turn off the competitive edge, even with your teammates.

 

**Smalls:** And for me, with my colleagues, you often don’t want to waste a great conversation by not having it on the air, and on the air, you’re limited by the job you’re asked to do. With each other, we can go beyond the day-to-day to talk about anything that interests us.

 

**Rodriguez:** That’s right. And with us, there are just so many conversations we’ve had since we were kids, it’s like when we start talking, we’re already right in the middle of it.

 

**Smalls:**  It’s true. And you know, I think a lot of it came from us spending so much time with Mr. Mertle when we were both kids.

 

**Mr. Mertle, your childhood neighbor. He’s a key figure in The Sandlot.**

 

**Rodriguez:** Yeah, he’d played in the Negro Leagues, and knew Babe Ruth, but got hurt and couldn’t go on playing. He had an insane amount of memorabilia, and the greatest stories.

 

**Smalls:** I still wish I’d written them all down. 

 

**Why didn’t you?**

 

**Smalls:** I meant to. But when you’re a kid, you think you have all the time in the world. You never do. He passed away before I got around to doing anything about it, and it doesn’t feel right to do anything without his involvement.

 

**Rodriguez:** He was such a great guy. I was so hoping he’d be around to see me get to the majors. Well, not see, exactly - you know what I mean.

 

**We do.**

 

**Smalls:** I like to think we’re both honoring his legacy. Benny had the baseball career he’d lost because of his injury, and I carried the baseball history he taught me into my work as a broadcaster.

 

**Rodriguez:** He would have been so excited. And he also would have been giving us pointers.

 

**Smalls:** Oh, all the time! No doubt! 

 

**So it sounds like you were in sporadic contact early in your careers. One question that arose out of the Sandlot, in part because it wasn’t addressed within it, was how you both ended up working with the L.A. Dodgers.**

 

**Smalls:** Well, Benny was drafted by them, he was always on his way there.

 

**Rodriguez:** Not necessarily! Maybe that one time, in ‘73, when it looked like they might bundle me in a trade?

 

**Smalls:** That was never going to happen!

 

**Rodriguez:** I know you always said that - and, okay, it didn’t actually end up happening -

 

**Smalls:** Could you please explain to my friend here that there was no way a baseball organization was going to let go of a prospect like him?

 

**I have to agree. It was never going to happen.**

 

**Rodriguez:** Well, it sure felt like it might happen! But that’s the nature of the game, and of any job associated with it, right, Scotty? You never knew where you’d be the next year until, what -

 

**Smalls:** I still wonder about it now.

 

**Rodriguez:** Give me a break. You know what I mean. Remember those years in the seventies and eighties, when you were floating around announcing for the Lodi Crushers?

 

**Smalls:** Oh, I remember. They’re called the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, now. And then I went to the Modesto Athletics - now the Modesto Nuts.

 

**Rodriguez:** Team names seem to get a lot more fun after you leave.

 

**Smalls:** I can’t disagree with you, though I hope it’s not on my account. But the point is, I did float around a bit, and I’m honestly not sure how the Dodgers ever discovered me. Benny insists it wasn’t him-

 

**Rodriguez:** It wasn’t!

 

**Smalls:** But I’m not entirely convinced.

 

**Neither am I, to be completely candid. It does seem like a pretty big coincidence. And you were at the height of your career then.**

 

**Smalls:** Listen, he’ll never own up to it. He never has in thirty years, I wouldn’t expect him to do it now. 

 

**Rodriguez:** And what does it matter? Scotty’s done great, he definitely deserved it, and he’s proven himself to be the right guy for the job.

 

**Smalls:** Right there, he’s practically admitting it, but he won’t actually admit it. It’s infuriating.

 

**The fact that you’re both laughing undermines the idea that any real fury is present.**

 

**Smalls:** That’s true! No, it’s fine. I think we both are pretty happy with how things worked out for each of us. 

 

**Rodriguez:** No complaints.

 

**One question that did arise as a result of the piece was why you hadn’t previously revealed your friendship. In your broadcasts, you never referred to your friendship or shared history. It made the reveal at the end of The Sandlot extremely powerful, but many people were left wondering why it hadn’t been brought up earlier?**

 

**Smalls:** I’ve seen a lot of discussion about this, people speculating about whether we hid it from the team - which is ridiculous, I’ve had a picture of our sandlot team on the wall of the broadcast booth since I first got there, and anyone could pick Benny out of that picture. And some people within the organization knew the history. Mostly I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t want it to be a distraction. That's also why I waited until after he was retired to sit down and write it, and it took a couple of years to pull together.

 

**Rodriguez:** Some people thought that I’d told him not to say anything, and that didn’t make sense to me. I never told Scotty how to do his job. And why would it bother me?

 

**Smalls:** People have speculated whether our friendship affected the way I broadcast the games. The answer to that is, yes, of course it has, but not in the way most people think. Knowing Benny has given me insight into the experience of players that informs the way I see the game, and I like to think it’s enhanced my ability to describe what’s happening on the field. I mean, no one’s ever going to mistake me for a great color commentator, and I’m grateful to have former players like Benny join me in the booth -

 

**Rodriguez:** He keeps trying to get me up there.

 

**Why don’t you? People would love it!**

 

**Rodriguez:** I’m no good at it. I know it, my wife knows it, even Scotty knows it, deep down.

 

**Smalls:** I think you’d be great. 

 

**Rodriguez:** I think we’d get talking and forget to watch the game.

 

**Smalls:** That is a possibility.

 

**Now, my final question - can you believe it’s been twenty years since the article was published?**

 

**Smalls:** I would like to say I can’t believe it and it doesn’t feel like a day has passed, but my back would disagree. But the truth is, the time has flown. I do miss having Benny on the field -

 

**Rodriguez:** You and me both, buddy.

 

**Smalls:** But I still love my work, and Benny stayed in the area, so we’re still in touch. 

 

**Rodriguez:** One thing that’s interesting is that all those years when we were working together, I never really got to see Scotty doing his job. I mean, sometimes, when he’d interview me -

 

**Smalls:** Those were fun.

 

**Rodriguez:** They were! How did people not know we were friends just from those? Remember that time you got me laughing because - what was it that got us both laughing? I can’t even remember.

 

**Smalls:** I can’t either, but I do remember that I was convinced I was going to be fired.

 

**Rodriguez:** But anyway, the point is, back then, Scotty was always broadcasting and I was on the field, and I never really got to hear him. So since I’ve retired, I’ve had a chance to do that. And it’s been great. Scotty’s so good at what he does.

 

**Smalls:** Not as good as you were on the field.

 

**Rodriguez:** Yeah, but who was? I’m kidding! Make sure you write down that I was kidding.

 

**I’ll be sure to make that clear.**

 

**Smalls:** You do call with the occasional piece of advice - 

 

**Rodriguez:**  Not that often!

 

**Smalls:** Only two games out of three.

 

**Rodriguez:** He’s full of it. I only call sometimes, and it’s because I can’t help myself. You spend your whole life thinking about the game, practicing, playing, and then all of a sudden you’re forty years old and it just - stops. That’s it. No more baseball. I just couldn’t turn it off like that. Luckily, I’ve got Scotty to harass.

  
**Smalls:** I wouldn’t have it any other way. 


End file.
